By Jamie Maw
Photo credit: Paul Joseph

“Seven days on the road is like seven years in the office,” my dad drummed into my brothers and me. He was probably referring to life on the road with his salesmen, back when they were building pulp mills and black-liquor evaporators. From Dad’s Book of Life we took other life lessons, usually informally dispatched while my mum was in the hospital having another baby or on road trips. “Get lost in order to become found!” he would proclaim. This handy tip referenced his propensity to drive into the countryside surrounding foreign capitals such as Campbell River and knock on doors for directions. He always had a bottle of decent wine or Seagram’s in the car in case we were invited in for dinner. We almost always were. Later there was “Life should be of a seamless sensuality, interrupted only by brief bouts of commerce”—no wait, that was my grandfather.

But Dad’s greatest hit was one that’s served me particularly well: “trust the chef most who owns his restaurant.” This, I suppose, is a riff on the old chestnut about never trusting a skinny chef, which holds less water today than for chefs of dad’s generation, who were more likely to be modelled after zeppelins.

I recently went to see a chef I trust. That he’s quite thin and fit didn’t disturb me at all, and that his chef’s whites, at the end of a long day’s preparation and dinner service were as crisp as his demeanour, less so again. His manner is as polished as the sleek Mercedes parked nearby. It is hardly a badge of pretension, I soon decided (for Michel Jacob is anything but pretentious), more a marque of the self-made man, now on an even footing with much of his clientele. He was serious when we first sat down. And I had barely lifted my first bite of steak tartare from the plate when he began, only gently prompted, to tell his story.

Born in Strasbourg in 1955, Jacob learned his craft because his father also dispensed advice. “My father wanted to be a chef, but after the war he had to settle for a job working for the French railway,” he began. “He cooked every Sunday for us, but perhaps he was also cooking for his dream—the one that passed him by.”

Jacob began his career at Restaurant Zimmer. He was only 14, performing the repetitive chores that, in French kitchens, earn wrath measured in hectolitres, praise in teaspoons. It was a toil. But soon he was on his way, to work with the famous Emile Jung at Au Crocodile, a majestic restaurant in Strasbourg’s heart that for many years held three Michelin macarons. It was a monastic life of utter discipline, with the long hours of a resident intern but few nurses to offer palliative care. Then Jacob, only 25, decamped for Canada, bringing with him only his knives, whites and a quiet but smouldering ambition. He landed at Umberto Menghi’s doorstep, and cooked at his doomed Il Palazzo for a short while. I broke a cuspid on a knuckle of Jacob’s braised rabbit in mustard sauce one night, but took home palliative care in the form of a beautiful wife.

In 1983, having lived frugally for several years, Jacob opened the first Le Crocodile. Named in homage to Jung, it was a tiny, 45-seat boite in the 800-block of Thurlow. Jacob was slowly mobbed, and became a competitor to his former employer. Although bistros had come and gone along Robson and in Gastown, Jacob quickly gained a reputation as one of the few serious French restaurants in town (the others were Le Napoleon and Jean-Claude Ramond’s brief-lived L’Orangerie) and soon attracted a loyal retinue of Francophile regulars. His cooking was good enough to survive the interest rate spike of the early ’80s and his sales grew past the million-dollar mark.

But Canada remained a culinary shock. Even simple ingredients were unavailable: calf liver, brains, foie gras, fresh herbs and specialty produce were difficult to procure. The government-mandated French wine list, especially from his native Alsace, was thin on the ground. He managed, specially ordering the items that set him apart and working with suppliers to tighten the specification for fish, game and produce.

In just a few years, he realized he was driving a four-cylinder car at maximum RPMs. With few seats, he couldn’t go any faster and sales had topped out at $1.1 million per annum. On the other hand, he was living well, had fallen in love with a young Quebecois woman, and his breakeven point was only $1,100 of sales per night. But Jacob’s kitchen was small, and competition from the restless Menghi and others was increasing. Soon, he would risk it all.
The Sutton Place Hotel had opened, linking Robson Street to the downtown core. More importantly, the hotel and long-term stay building at the corner of Smithe and Burrard was attracting much of the Los Angeles movie crowd. Vancouver’s nascent film industry was taking off. Jacob signed a lease for the ground floor, spent his savings decorating the shell in shades of yellow (now sienna), built an attractive bar at the entry, hung oils of the French countryside and pretty shaded wall sconces to light them. He invested more money in deepening his cellar, remaining famously loyal to a French-dominated list, and opened his doors. The relocated Le Crocodile was a success, and the expanded premises pushed revenues, and then profits.

But Jacob’s real story lies behind the umber walls of his dining room, in his kitchen. For Michel Jacob is a chef first and a propriétaire second, although there are nights, especially rainy Tuesdays in February, when he thinks the order might be reversed. To watch Jacob in action is a study in contained motion, like a professional athlete, predictive in the application of energy to task, but also predictive of what the next task will be. Part matador, part ballet dancer, the nightly choreography is designed to produce only, like the dance itself, a precise elegance on the plate. It is a dance Jacob has been performing for 35 years.

Twelve years in the new premises have been kind, and Jacob’s clientele is amongst the most loyal in town. “But the risk levels have risen dramatically from the early days,” Jacob explains. “Now our nightly breakeven is $8,000 and on an average weeknight we serve 60 to 90 covers, on the weekend up to 130.” His average dinner check is $100, which puts the arithmetic in perspective.

Last summer, Jacob welcomed his old mentor, Emile Jung, from Strasbourg. He remembered his early days in Jung’s great kitchens, “where it was not the easiest job, but it was the most rewarding—instant gratification or instant rejection.” For his loyalists, they did a little cooking together.

Jacob has pushed himself to stay on top of it. “My staff says I am never happy,” he says. He has run four marathons and regularly bikes to Whistler. He is, as he says, in “teep-top shape.” At 50, he has resolved his ambition and now just wants to cook. “I have no interest in writing a cookbook—that is for the ego,” he says. “Cooking reaches into the soul, and that will be my legacy and my memories—a smile remembered, a thank you, a thoughtful note.”

Jacob has turned out some star students—the two best known being David Hawksworth and Robert Feenie, but also Rhonda Viani, West’s talented chef de patisserie. It was Feenie who almost didn’t stay the course, not for a lack of talent or even application. “He had lots of talent and even more potential,” Jacob says. “But he wanted to take off Monday and Thursday nights, which made no sense. He soon explained that his father was a fire chief in Burnaby, and that those were the two nights of the St. John’s Ambulance course that he required to qualify for the fire department. So I called his father and we arranged a meeting with Rob who soon explained that he didn’t want to become a chef because there was no social life. We talked him back into it and I’m glad we did,” Jacob says. “And I’m glad for Vancouver that we did.”

Tonight, sommelier Robert Stelmachuk wheels through the room—quiet, assured. The waiters, in long white aprons, mimic the dance in the kitchen. The other night, on the occasion of an important family birthday, we ate very well and the guest of honour, who left the room with a new ring and teasing accolades on having reached her majority, was delighted with my choice of both restaurants and daughters. You see, I wanted her to love me a little more, and I think that that is why restaurants like Le Crocodile exist.
I have resisted telling you about the food. It has not been easy, for Le Crocodile, on any given night, is one of the best restaurants in the province. Let me just say this: Le Crocodile is the type of restaurant my dad would love—especially had he, lost one evening, knocked on the door and invited himself in. He would have been asked, you see, to stay awhile.